This invention relates to determining seat availability information from within a travel planning system.
A travel planning system makes use of many classes of information including scheduling, faring, and availability data. The scheduling data describes where and when a passenger may travel; the faring data defines how much a given travel itinerary will cost; and the availability data describes the travel provider's willingness to sell the travel for the given cost. The availability data is often affected by the travel provider's capacity and their prior sales of similar products at similar prices, and is analogous to a report on remaining inventory.
Sources of seat availability information include, but are not limited to, direct queries to external databases of seat availability information. Each source of availability information typically has associated fixed and marginal costs of obtaining information from that source, including computation, communication, time, and money. Further, each source may return answers with differing freshness, confidence, and validity properties.
Conventional travel planning systems begin travel planning by choosing a small number of flights, checking availability for the flights by querying the airline's yield management system directly, and then faring the available seats. They have no other source of seat availability information to query, and make no other use of the availability information than to eliminate the unavailable booking classes of the few preselected flights from further consideration.